Blog & New Postings

Month July 2017

Like the United States, the Islamic Republic of Iran has faced critical challenges from rising opioid addiction. And like the U.S., Iran has experimented with a wide variety of remedial responses, ranging from supply reduction efforts and harsh punishment of users to expansion of harm reduction, treatment, and recovery support services. The latter include the(……)

Fifty years ago, young people from all over American descended on San Francisco in what was billed as “The Summer of Love.” Historians have often portrayed this event as the detonation point of a youth-oriented, polydrug culture whose legacies continue to ripple. The Summer of Love events served as a catalyst for a new social(……)

The affluent alcoholic has always had institutions that catered to his or her needs for periodic detoxification and physical and emotional renewal. When inebriate homes, inebriate asylums and addiction cure institutes collapsed in the opening decades of the 20th century, a new social institution quietly emerged on the American landscape. This new institution was the(……)

So it is not our job to pass judgment on who will and will not recover from mental illness and the spirit breaking effects of poverty, stigma, dehumanization, degradation and learned helplessness. Rather, our job is to participate in a conspiracy of hope. It is our job to form a community of hope which surrounds(……)

In 1976, Dr. Thomasina Borkman penned a now-classic paper depicting two ways of knowing: professional knowledge and experiential knowledge. In distinguishing the two, she noted the following: “In contrast to professional information, experiential knowledge is (1) pragmatic rather than theoretical or scientific, (2) oriented to here-and-now action rather than to the long-term development and systematic(……)